1. FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to electronic musical instruments that generate tones corresponding to musical notes and, more particularly, to foot-actuated pedal consoles for selectively producing chords from combinations of such notes by utilizing the existing tone generating circuitry of such electronic instruments.
2. DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIOR ART
Modern musical compositions often call for the use of electronic musical instruments to provide background accompaniment for a lead instrument, such as a guitar, horn or reed instrument. The background accompaniment typically consists of a repetitive sequence of chords or combinations of musical notes played on an electronic instrument such as an electronic organ.
Conventional electronic circuitry exists which permits an unskilled musician to provide a chord accompaniment to a melody. A system widely used on electronic organs permits the generation of musical chords when certain "root" note keys are depressed on a manual keyboard. Another system described in Craegar et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,962,945, comprises a remote foot-actuated pedal console that interfaces with traditional electronic organ circuitry to selectively generate chords or note combinations upon depression of pedals. This latter arrangement offers the advantage that the lead musician himself can play the chord accompaniment with his feet while leaving his hands free to play the lead instrument.
Such existing chord composing systems suffer the disadvantage that depression of a particular key or pedal results in the generation of a single preset chord, and no means exists to vary the chord or note combination produced by depression of that key or pedal. Thus, although a particular background accompaniment may consist of a repetition of only three or four chords, the musician must know the location of and select from all available chord producing keys or pedals. In the Craegar arrangement, for example, the three or four chords must be repetitively selected from among 65 pedals arranged in five rows of 13 columns each--an arduous task for a musician playing a lead melody on another instrument with his hands.